In order to be able to beat the highest tier, I should be forced to grind PVE Cards and Equipment. As it is now, I can take a solid PVP deck and beat all tiers without much effort.

I suggest the following:
create about 6 tiers, which have a real difference in difficulty: let the hardest tier be a real pain to beat!
It s not interesting for good players to go through a couple of beginners tiers. So let the player be able to choose freely which tier he wants to battle.
The loot should be according to the tier difficulty: More rares, Epics, or numbers of loot for higher tiers.

Well, that s just an idea

Greetings

Optimus

Kurasa

02-07-2015, 10:50 AM

You're right, the arena's pretty easy right now, especially with access to everything. We will have to grind for PvE cards and equipment for the real thing, though. The test server is set up so that we can use anything, since that's more useful for testing. Plus the AI will be better, which should raise the difficulty substantially. And there are already plans for a hard mode with better loot.

Gwaer

02-07-2015, 10:51 AM

I think this is the most relevant post in response to yours

http://forums.cryptozoic.com/showthread.php?t=40626&page=2&p=455452#post455452
Quoted here in its entirety.

Let me be the first to tell you that we are aware of the issues with brand new players and is actually something we spend a lot of time thinking about. One of the biggest discussions that came up internally (and probably most important ones) about the Arena is who is the Arena for?

The Arena has a lot of masters that it could potentially try to serve, and in doing so would likely serve each one of those masters poorly. It could be an on ramp for new players that provides free to play content with increasing challenges and difficulty modes for experienced players while throwing new mechanics and new PvE sytems at you. It actually started off trying to be that, particularly because this is the first PvE experience that players are going to have and you only get one chance to make a first impression.

After some lengthy discussions we decided that the initial launch of Arena needed to sit within a reasonable place along the wide spectrum of player skill, and that the on ramp was super important to getting new people into the game. We have been pushing Tier 1 to be relatively easy for a new player to get through, but if we find that it is still too difficult then the appropriate changes will be made. That being said, we added a feature that lets you skip Tier 1 if you have Perfected the Tier at any point with your account to allow more experienced players to avoid having to go through a more basic tier each time they go into the Arena.

We are keeping a watchful eye on how difficult Tier 1 is, and of course we are continuing to make AI improvements to help increase the difficulty. As more equipment becomes live the later tiers should become more challenging as well. If we find that things are too easy at the top end, then we can make changes there too if need be.

Ultimately we want new players to feel like they have a reasonable chance at getting through the Tier 1. We spent a lot of time asking ourselves the question "What happens if a new player comes in and loses to the first or second encounter repeatedly because they are too hard? Will that player convince him/herself that this game isn't for him/her?" The answer to that question is probably yes, so we will continue to make the appropriate changes to make sure that doesn't happen.

For the players who find the Arena to be too easy, we have more content planned that is aimed at satiating those players. Ultimately, however, the Arena is not the full PvE experience and isn't set up to handle all of the design space that we will be exploring when it comes to dungeons.

That is from the lead pve guy, to me it seems they had to focus the arena down to serve as an intro to newish players, rather than as a challenge for people with full pvp collections. This is kind of a shame, but it makes sense. PVP players will have more sets before the PVE game really gets going. We're getting our content and our fixes, the other half of the community is dreadfully underserved.

On that same line of reasoning however, if it is not challenging enough to keep a new player interested for a goodly amount of time they will get bored, and leave. So it needs to be targeted to challenge someone with just a starter deck, and progress them through enough that they can get some good loot drops, and maybe sell them on the AH to buy things they specifically want.